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Documenting Hiroshima of 1945: Late October, certificates issued for family “burned to death in bombing”

by Minami Yamashita, Staff Writer

In late October 1945, Fukuichi Kawamoto, owner of a wholesale bicycle shop, quickly built a shack structure in the area of Sarugaku-cho (in Hiroshima’s present-day Naka Ward), located near the hypocenter, in an attempt to rebuild his business even as the surrounding area remained a scorched ruins. Some of the households in the area had been completely eliminated in the atomic bombing and, according to the Record of the Hiroshima A-bomb War Disaster, published in 1971, Mr. Kawamoto’s was the only house in the vicinity of the hypocenter through around October 1945.

Yoshiyuki Miyazaki, eight at the time, who died in 2022 at the age of 85, had lost all four of his family members living in Sarugaku-cho. “This is to certify that [the family members were] burned to death in the wartime air attack at their home in Sarugaku-cho on August 6,” read the certificates about their deaths. The four certificates, issued under the name of the president of the city’s Fukuro-machi federation neighborhood association on October 26, 1945, are currently held at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Mr. Miyazaki had been living with his parents and two sisters in Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture but, as part of mass evacuations from the city, he was the only one of them to move to the northern area of the prefecture in 1944. In July 1945, his father, Takeji, went to see his son at the site to which he had been evacuated, telling him that the four other family members, relying on relatives, had moved to Hiroshima.

Mr. Miyazaki never had a chance to see his family again. In mid-August, relatives met him at the evacuation site and took him to Sarugaku-cho. They were unable to find the remains of Takeji, his mother, Toshie, who was 32 at the time of the bombing, or his younger sisters, Yasue, 6, and Noriko, 2. He was the only surviving member of the family and grew up moving between different relatives’ homes in Hiroshima and Japan’s Kansai region.

Mr. Miyazaki received the certificates as well as his parents’ memorial photographs from a relative around 2008. His wife, Kimi, 86, a resident of Kyoto City, said, “My husband didn’t clearly remember even the faces of his family because they had been separated due to the evacuation when he was a child, so he cherished the documents.” Based on his wish they be preserved for a long time, he donated the materials to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 2017.

A portion of the ashes of Mr. Miyazaki, who died two years ago, were spread in the Motoyasu River running next to the former Sarugaku-cho area. In accordance with the desire he expressed while alive that his ashes be spread “to be together with my parents and sisters, though I don’t know how far in the future that will be,” Kimi and their three children saw him off at the river.

(Originally published on October 27, 2024)

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